Clear Channel Pays $40/Hr To Call Into Limbaugh, Hannity, & Beck--Obama uses shills to call into same shows with his talking points

Both the Republicunts and Democraps LOVE to out each other on tactics they use themselves. Dig these two articles noting that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck et al use paid callers on their shows, and Obama uses shills to call into those very shows with Obama talking points. That pretty much covers the call-in portion of their shows--none of it is real. None of it. Quit listening to them, quit buying into their definition of what this country is all about. Wake up!


Radio Daze
Tabletmag

(Liel Leibovitz)  Last year, a young man called in to a radio station with a problem. He’d recently attended a bachelor party, he said, and a friend of the groom-to-be, clueless of the unwritten etiquette of maledom, brought his girlfriend along, derailing what was supposed to be a weekend of gambling, girls, and general debauchery. The caller told his story with passion and verve, and then asked the station’s listeners for their advice on how to treat his clueless pal.

Or at least he would have, had this been a real conversation. The young man—who asked to remain nameless in order to protect his chances for future employment—was an actor, and the staged call an audition. A short while later, he received the following email: “Thank you for auditioning for Premiere On Call,” it said. “Your audition was great! We’d like to invite you to join our official roster of ‘ready-to-work’ actors.” The job, the email indicated, paid $40 an hour, with one hour guaranteed per day.

But what exactly was the work? The question popped up during the audition and was explained, the actor said, clearly and simply: If he passed the audition, he would be invited periodically to call in to various talk shows and recite various scenarios that made for interesting radio. He would never be identified as an actor, and his scenarios would never be identified as fabricated—which they always were.

“I was surprised that it seemed so open,” the actor told me in an interview. “There was really no pretense of covering it up.”

Curious, the actor did some snooping and learned that Premiere On Call was a service offered by Premiere Radio Networks, the largest syndication company in the United States and a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications, the entertainment and advertising giant. Premiere syndicates some of the more sterling names in radio, including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity. But a great radio show depends as much on great callers as it does on great hosts: Enter Premiere On Call.

“Premiere On Call is our new custom caller service,” read the service’s website, which disappeared as this story was being reported (for a cached version of the site click here). “We supply voice talent to take/make your on-air calls, improvise your scenes or deliver your scripts. Using our simple online booking tool, specify the kind of voice you need, and we’ll get your the right person fast. Unless you request it, you won’t hear that same voice again for at least two months, ensuring the authenticity of your programming for avid listeners.”

The actors hired by Premiere to provide the aforementioned voice talents sign confidentiality agreements and so would not go on the record. But their accounts leave little room for doubt. All of the actors I questioned reported receiving scripts, calling in to real shows, pretending to be real people. Frequently, one actor said, the calls were live, sometimes recorded in advance, but never presented on-air as anything but real.

Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers Magazine, the talk-radio world’s leading trade publication, said he knew nothing of this particular service but was not altogether surprised to hear that it was in place. There was, he said, a tradition of “creating fake phone calls for the sake of entertainment on some of the funny shows, shock jocks shows, the kind of shows you hear on FM music stations in the morning, they would regularly have scenarios, crazy scenarios of people calling up and doing pranks.”

Rachel Nelson, a Premiere Radio Networks spokesperson, defended the Premiere on Call service and said that responsibility for how it is employed falls ultimately to those who use it.
“Premiere provides a wide variety of audio services for radio stations across the country, one of which is connecting local stations in major markets with great voice talent to supplement their programming needs,” Nelson wrote in an email. “Voice actors know this service as Premiere On Call. Premiere, like many other content providers, facilitates casting—while character and script development, and how the talent’s contribution is integrated into programs, are handled by the varied stations.”

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Organizing for America building army of talk radio ‘seminar callers’

by Kathy Shaidle

Remember Organizing for America (OFA)? It used to be “Obama for America,” an offshoot of the Democratic National Committee that assembled a vast volunteer army of Obama supporters. But when the election was over and won, “Obama for America” went through a slight transformation:

Another factor that motivated the Obama administration to create OFA was the fact that after the new President had taken his oath of office, his White House was, by law, barred from using (for subsequent political purposes) the 13-million-name e-mail list of supporters it had compiled during the 2008 presidential race. Thus the administration established OFA within the structure of the Democratic Party, which was not bound by such restrictions; OFA is free to use the aforementioned list as it pleases. (…)

As one of its strategies for influencing public opinion, OFA seeks to exploit the power of the Internet as a networking and communication medium. Whereas previous U.S. presidents communicated with the American public chiefly by recording a weekly speech and then releasing it for radio stations to air on Saturday mornings, President Obama regularly disseminates his messages via popular websites…

OFA’s latest web-based project involves inundating talk radio shows with callers pushing Obamacare. Here’s part of the relevant page on the OFA site:

Each day, millions of Americans turn to talk radio as a trusted source of news and opinions on the big issues of the day.

Getting thousands of OFA supporters to call in to these shows in support of health reform and President Obama’s agenda will have a dramatic impact — and will help shape public opinion.

But we need you to make it happen…

OFA goes on to ask folks to sign up, get assigned a station in their area, and starting phoning in during talk shows, to push Obamacare talking points.

The trouble with this strategy is: it won’t work.

Rush Limbaugh coined the word “seminar callers” to describe people like this, because leftists used to train would-be talk radio callers in special seminars. These trained callers learn to begin by saying, “I listen to your show all the time, and normally I agree with you/I’m a lifelong Republican/but…” then recite memorized liberal talking points. (Here’s an IndyMedia how-to.)

It’s just another form of astroturfing, and it stopped working years ago.

All big time talk radio shows have peerless call screeners who usually detect these frauds before they get on the air.  If these astroturfers do get through, a smart host can make them look pretty foolish, pretty fast.

Seminar calling is going the way of that other leftist tactic, the boycott. Boycotts don’t work anymore because a) leftists target companies that leftists don’t patronize anyway (like WalMart), b) older leftists have boycott fatigue, and younger ones only pay lip service to them, and c) boycotts can’t harm certain modern day businesses, like cable TV (as I’ve explained before.)

And I think OFA knows this. (If they don’t, then the good news is, the Democrats are dumber than we thought.)

This campaign, and their other internet efforts, are just a way to harvest email addresses, so they can tap the suckers for donations later on.

Nothing says “progressive” like that patented hybrid of idealism and cynicism.

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Disdain drips from every word in the second article, as if the writer is blissfully unaware her heroes hire callers to call their shows. It goes both ways. The sooner people realize this the better. Your heroes are not heroes, they are actors who follow a script. Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh would be liberal talkshow hosts if there were a market for them. Liberals don't listen to talk radio but conservatives do, so that's the role they play. Dennis Miller got into the con, too. Saw where the money was, and dipped himself in red state hothead red. Money, money, money. Not principles--MONEY. 

This information, when considered with the fact Glenn Beck used Vick's in his eyes for his crying game scenes on his former TV show, just exposes the whole political/talkshow industry as the fake propaganda it is. If you watch or listen to these shows, no matter what your affiliation is, you never get anything real or truthful, and if you base your political views on these talkshows and the views of their hosts, then your views aren't real either. You're just a cardboard cut-out and by being so oriented, you're the result of their lying game being successful. How does that make you feel?

America Is Now Officially for Sale

It's the Tea Party spirit distilled: pose as the champion of Joe America, while actually ripping him off

by Johann Hari

Friday, November 5, 2010 by The Independent/UK 

The laws and policies of the legislature of the United States of America are now effectively on e-Bay, for sale to the highest bidder. Are you a Wall Street boss who wants to party like it's 2007? Are you a Big Coal baron who wants to burn, baby, burn? Are you an insurance company that wants to be able to kick sick people off your rolls? Meet John Boehner, the most powerful Republican and soon-to-be Speaker of the House. But - of course! - you already have.

Here's an example of how you have worked together. In 1995, the House was going to finally repeal subsidies for growing tobacco, because an addictive cancer-causing drug didn't seem like the most deserving recipient of tax-payers' cash - until Boehner walked the floor of the House handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to his fellow elected representatives. They changed their minds. The subsidy stayed. Explaining his check-dispensing, Boehner says: "It's gone on here for a long time." So get your bids in: the House is open for business.

To understand what has happened in the mid-term elections, the best guide lies in an unexpected place - the dusty vaults of Hollywood. In 1957, Elia Kazan directed a film called ‘A Face In The Crowd' that read the tea-leaves of the Tea Party back when Sarah Palin was merely a frosty zygote. One morning a poor wandering Arkansas chancer named Larry ‘Lonesome' Rhodes is lying passed out on a jail cell where the local sheriff has detained him overnight. A pretty young radio producer arrives and asks if he'd like to tell her a story to be played on her show where ordinary folks speak to ordinary folks. He sings and rambles and offers corn-poke homilies. The clip is a huge hit - and he is soon given his own show, filled with country music and country wisdom which then shoots off into the stratosphere.

When Lonesome Rhodes becomes one of the biggest stars on US television, he starts receiving offers. Advertisers say that if he endorses their lousy products, they'll shower him with millions. He knows how to sell to ordinary people - and he is pushed to go further. They ask him to sell the political causes that will make them richer too. He starts railing against social security and the old age pension and anything that taxes the rich to help the rest. He uses the tunes and slanguage of working class Americans to get them to emotionally identify with the people who are screwing them over. He's brilliant at it - a gurning hyperactive huckster, saying that support and security for ordinary Americans is a betrayal of America. He makes himself rich by lying to the people he came from.

Fast-forward to 2010. John Boehner came from a poor family of twelve children, and heroically worked three jobs (including as a janitor) to put himself through business school. But when he got to elected office, it turned out that there was alot more money to be reaped from serving the interests of rich people than serving the people he came from. He took money from the insurance companies, and voted to deny healthcare coverage to sick children and to the people who hurried to the World Trade Centre on 9/11 to try to dig people from the wreckage, exposing them to deadly toxins. He took money from defense contractors, and supported every war going. He tirelessly champions the overdog, while hoovering up their cash and flying on their private jets to some of the most luxury resorts in the world.

In the campaign, Boehner said his priority was to "stand up for ordinary Americans" against "the elite", and to "cut the deficit as a matter of urgency." So what has been his first priority as Speaker? To fight furiously to keep the gigantic Bush tax cuts for the elite richest two percent of Americans, even though this alone will add two trillion dollars to the deficit over the next decade. It's very revealing. He immediately dumps on his propaganda causes - ordinary Americans, and the deficit - while slavishly serving his one true cause: serving the interests of rich people like the ones who happen to pay for his campaigns and his jaunts.

This is the story of the modern Republican Party. They use the cultural signifiers of the good people of Middle America to get their emotional identification, meanwhile they pillage Middle America and redistribute its wealth to the rich. Sarah Palin is the queen of this cause. She presents herself as a warrior for hockey moms and Momma Grizzlies, while spreading fictions to stop those very people supporting social programs that could save their lives: remember her claim that Obama's healthcare plan involved setting up "death panels" to execute the old and disabled? Her true slogan is Shill, Baby, Shill.

This is all made easy for Republicans by the fact that most of the Democratic Party slithers in the same trough of corruption, begging from the same billionaires and corporations, and so can deliver only a tiny notch more for ordinary Americans. This makes left-liberal ideas look discredited, when in truth they are largely discarded. To name just one: the very high unemployment in the US has been presented by Republicans as proof that economic stimulus doesn't work. But in reality, Obama's stimulus was appallingly small, and was counter-balanced by the fact that the individual states were slashing spending and laying people off. Once you add the two together, there has been no net stimulus in the US economy at all.

The essence of the Tea Party - and the relevance of ‘A Face In The Crowd' - can be seen most plainly in Glenn Beck. Just over a decade ago, he was a drug-taking, pro-abortion, perpetually drunk DJ on morning radio. One of his famous "pranks" was to ring up the wife of a radio-show rival a few days after she had a miscarriage and taunt her about her loss. But then he stumbled into political commentary. After 9/11, Beck began to articulate a blubbery, blubbering hysteria, calling for the shooting of Michael Moore and the poisoning of Nancy Pelosi. He announced that any government program helping ordinary Americans was a step towards "communism", and prophesied: "The country may not survive Barack Obama? If he does fundamentally transform America, we're done. You don't have to worry about a 2012." He shot up to be the second highest rated show in cable news, and assembled hundreds of thousands to a rally on the Mall. At times seems quite conscious of the manipulation: "They're getting so tired of me saying there's a Marxist in the White House, I gotta take it up a notch," he reportedly said to one private audience.

But a few years ago, he began to do something stranger still. He announced that the US was going to experience hyperinflation and savings would be rendered worthless - so his viewers should transfer their cash into gold. But not just any gold. No: Obama was probably going to seize gold bullion and nationalize it, he warned, so they should buy gold coins. "I think people are running out of options on what, you know, could be worth something at all. You have to think like a German Jew, 1934," he said.

Meanwhile, Beck's program on Fox News is sponsored by a company called Goldline that sells gold coins. As it turned out there is no hyperinflation and no Obama plan to seize bullion. Yet Beck's claims - and constant praise for Goldline - have made him and the company considerably richer. The only people who are worse off are Beck's viewers: the investigative journalist Dana Milbank looked at 2008 and calculated that they would have seen a higher return if they had kept their money in cash than in golden coins. A court in Missouri ruled a few years ago that Goldline pressured a woman in her eighties to invest $230,000 in gold coins actually worth half that sum. The Securities and Exchanges Commission are investigating the company, and Senator Anthony Weiner says Beck and other on-air promoters "are either the worst financial advisors around or knowingly lying to their loyal viewers." It's the Tea Party spirit distilled: pose as the champion of Joe America, while ripping him off.

There is, however, one significant difference from ‘A Face In The Crowd'. At the end of the film - spoiler alert - Lonesome Rhodes is finishing a show and, as the end credits roll and the music swells, he rants against his viewers, believing they can't hear him. But in the control box, a producer deliberately flips a switch. Suddenly millions hear him say: "Those morons out there. I'd give ‘em dog food and make ‘em think it's steak. Good night you stupid idiots. Good night you miserable slobs. They're like a bunch of trained seals - I toss ‘em a fish and they lap it up." John Boehner and Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are ridiculing their followers just as crudely. Can't somebody at Fox flip the switch?

Glenn Beck's Rampant Misuse of Founding Fathers Myths

Glenn Beck and the Tea Party re-write American history to serve their agenda.
By Sally Kohn, Christian Science Monitor
Posted on October 15, 2010

Fox News television host Glenn Beck says the idea of "collective salvation" - that our fates are linked - is "dangerous to the Constitutional republic." He argues that related notions of social justice, redistribution, and ending oppression are fundamentally anti-American, communist creeds. American's Founding Fathers would disagree. They embraced collective redemption and the protection of the common good.

The Constitution made clear from its first lines the collectivist intent of the American enterprise:

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Our collective best interest. 
A union. For the common defense. General welfare. Justice. Though our unity has endured serious trials, America was not by accident called the United States of America. In a letter to James Madison, George Washington wrote, "We are either a united people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation, which have national objects to promote, and a national character to support. If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it."

The message remains clear today. We cannot just say we are a nation and cling to an inflated sense of nationalism while, in practice, ignoring the needs and humanity of our fellow Americans. We have to act like a nation a" working together as a nation for our collective best interest.

In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson said that we must "unite in common efforts for the common good." Chief among those "common efforts" was America itself.

Hard-earned lessons in cooperation
Yes, the colonists fled the tyranny of the British crown, but the choice they made was democracy over monarchy, not extreme individualism over statehood. Certainly, their spirit of independence still undergirds the American character today, but our history is also a testament to hard-earned lessons in cooperation.

The American Revolution and subsequent founding of the United States of America were definitive acts of collective salvation, deciding that we could be more as a nation than as individuals alone.

Why equality matters
Within this context, the Founding Fathers saw the importance of ensuring a level playing field within the new republic - that the common good of equality could never be achieved by people on unequal footing. John Adams wrote, "Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men."

Sure, some of our Founding Fathers had a long way to go in their day-to-day treatment of women, people of color, and minority religions - and that's putting it mildly. But those principles of equality and insurances for common good were written into our founding documents with great purpose. And they have paved the way for every future step toward equality this country has made.

The Founders, in their wisdom, never said America was perfect. They made clear they were working to perfect the union, which subsequent generations would continue.

In the Federalist Papers, Madison elaborated that society's unequal groupings - the landed versus those without property, creditors versus debtors, and so on - are "much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good." Beck and other pundits have labeled "oppression" a bad word the left uses to play victim and blame conservatives.

The consequences of oppression
But founders like Madison were acutely aware of real oppression within America's borders - and the very real consequences of this inequality on the country as a whole. The "principle task" of government is to regulate and balance these interests toward the ideal of equality, Madison wrote.

Glenn Beck's narrative claims working class, mostly white folks in America are being undermined by the needs of poor people and people of color - needs prioritized by an allegedly biased and socialist President Obama. In Beck's mind, "collective salvation" isn't collective at all but code for putting some people's interests first. It's an ironic critique considering that conservative economic policies have for decades put the needs of big business and the richest of the rich ahead of everyone else, whether black or white, middle class or poor.

Sharing apple pie
Even more ironic is that Beck himself actually embraces "collective salvation" - the idea that none of us can be saved until all of us are saved.

He isn't directing Americans to turn inward and solve their problems alone. Beck wants you to watch his show, come to his march in Washington, call your representatives, talk to your neighbors, agitate in your church - making clear that he knows individual problems of such magnitude can only be solved through collective action.

If only Beck and other pundits, quick to point fingers, would go a step further and see that all of our problems - falling wages for working people, rising cost of living, foreclosures, crumbling education infrastructure, racial tension, insecurity - cannot just be solved by one group binding together in a pitched partisan battle against "the other." Instead, all of us must work in "common efforts for the common good."

Collective salvation isn't anathema to America; it's essential to the Founders' vision. It's as American as sharing apple pie.

Democrat worries on Stewart rally

Ben Smith, September 20, 2010

Jon Stewart's planned "Rally for Sanity" sounded a bit like a joke when he announced -- without his permit application approved -- that he'd hold it on October 30 in Washington, D.C.

But it's suddenly looking quite real: Nearly 100,000 people have written on Facebook that they're planning to attend, and I ran into some of them, a bit to my surprise, this weekend. Keach Hagey reports that they've asked for a permit for 25,000 people, fewer than attended Glenn Beck's rally.

But the planned event has also produced a bit of hand-wringing among Democrats. For one thing, Stewart hasn't mentioned that labor groups and other institutional Democratic organizations are already planning a big Washington rally to counter Beck: The One America rally on October 2, which has been struggling to get the kind of attention Beck does. And the Stewart rally is also, for Democratic field operatives, at an inconvenient time: Its participants are "not doing GOTV on GOTV weekend" said Matt Ortega, a former DNC staffer, referring to a weekend typically spent knocking on doors and making calls in one's home district, not Washington.

"Midterm elections are about turnout and as has widely been reported, there is an intensity gap in this election, with the Republican base more motivated than the Democrats'. Some of that gap can be closed with an aggressive ground campaign -- we can make up 2-3% in a given race by talking to people at their doors and on their phones," emails veteran labor Democratic consultant Steve Rosenthal. "I love Jon Stewart -- rarely miss the show, but to the extent that some people who will attend his rally would otherwise be involved in GOTV efforts this is not helpful."

Other Democratic field organizers, though, said the event would be a plus on balance, and suggested that the party could even set up phone banks beside it.

"He will energize many, many more people than he will distract. And those who attend are only a small piece of the audience," emails Dan Cantor, executive director of New York's labor-backed Working Families Party.

Nation editor Chris Hayes emails with a broader concern: That the event "points out he asymmetry of the right and left. "

First: It's hard to imagine lots of democratic politicians showing up to a left equivalent of Glenn Beck's rally (and I wonder how many will be at the *actual* progressive march on October 2nd), but more than that is puts our current ideological predicament in stark terms. On the right, a large, well-funded, organized, ideologically zealous movement dedicated to a genuinely reactionary vision of America. On the other side? A very gifted satirist calling for everyone to just chill. If I landed here from Mars and took this in and was asked to bet on who's going to have more political success, it would be a no-brainer.

The Shady Right-Wingers Who Pull Glenn Beck's Strings Are Dangerous

Beck is being used to enforce the very political and economic structures that subjugate the people who worship him.

By Laurence Lewis, Daily Kos
Posted on September 5, 2010

Glenn Beck is a charlatan. A clown. A buffoon. He belongs on a second tier stage in Vegas, and he very well may end up there, some day. He is not dangerous, but his ability to exploit the legitimately angry dispossessed reveals something that is dangerous. Decades of right wing economic policies have undermined unions, the middle class, the social safety net, and the sense that we are all in this together, moving into a better future. Few believe their children or grandchildren will inherit a better world. People are afraid, and they don't understand why they are afraid. And while Glenn Greenwald is correct that by not seizing the mantle of populism, the Democrats have created a void that was ripe for exploitation, that inevitable exploitation has come to be personified by the likes of Glenn Beck. He disseminates lies and disinformation, preying on the vulnerable, distracting them from even beginning to be able to grasp the real reasons why their dreams seem more and more illusory, and their ability to maintain even a basic sense of security and comfort more and more tenuous.

Dana Milbank is about to publish a book on Beck, and the poor guy did his research. Presumably, afterward, he had to sterilize himself with turpentine and kerosene. In an article in the Washington Post, over the weekend, he provided a brief summary of what he has learned about Beck. And he began by recounting an anecdote from Beck's 2003 memoir. Beck admits to having been strongly influenced by Orson Welles, who used to travel around Manhattan in an ambulance. The sirens were screaming not because Welles was ill, but because it was a good way to beat traffic.

Milbank:

Most of us would regard this as dishonest, a ploy by the self-confessed charlatan that Welles was. Beck saw it as a model to be emulated. "Welles," he writes, "inspired me to believe that I can create anything that I can see or imagine."

But as Milbank points out, Welles was an admitted charlatan. First and foremost, he was a showman, one of the rare filmmakers about whom the word "genius" legitimately applied. Welles was the master of illusion, making magic of manipulation. For the most part, he used that genius and mastery to entertain and create art, although it famously got well out of hand with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast. But Beck casts himself as something genuine. He cries as if he's capable of genuine sympathy and empathy. But his manipulations and machinations are not merely for entertainment, and they're not even merely for self-aggrandizement. First and foremost, they are used to enforce and reinforce the very political and economic structures that subjugate the people whose alienation and disillusionment find false solace in the theatrical rantings of people like Beck.

Milbank:

I was reminded of Beck's affection for deception as he hyped his march on Washington -- an event scheduled for the same date (Aug. 28) and on the same spot (the Lincoln Memorial) as Martin Luther King Jr.'s iconic march 47 years ago. Beck claimed it was pure coincidence, but then he made every effort to appropriate the mantle of the great civil rights leader.

King, the peacemaker. The adherent to the principles of Gandhi. The man who wrote and lived "Strength To Love." And then, there's Beck, who says he chose the date of his rally without even knowing its historical significance, attributing the coincidence to "divine providence." And the most disturbing part is that some people apparently believe him.

As Beck attempts to turn the world inside out and upside down by claiming the mantle of a movement he probably would have opposed, and whose means he is too small even to begin to comprehend, Milbank lists some of Beck's greatest moments as a champion of civil rights.

• As a radio host, performed an on-air skit that mocked a stereotyped Asian accent, forcing his station to apologize.
• On CNN, while interviewing Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, demanded proof that Ellison isn't working with "our" enemies.
• Called President Obama a "racist" who has a "deep-seated hatred for white people."
• Claims Obama was elected because he isn't white.
• Claims Obama is moving us into slavery.
• Asserted that the president's very name is Un-American.
• Claims Obama seeks reparations from white America, to "settle old racial scores."
• Has claimed Obama is tied to or influenced by "radical black nationalism" and "Marxist black liberation theology" and the New Black Panther Party, which Beck claims is part of Obama's "army of thugs."

It would almost be funny if so many didn't take it seriously. And if their taking it seriously wasn't part of a deeply disturbing hidden agenda. As Frank Rich explained, last Sunday:

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are. 

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might. 

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

And Rich referred to the chillingly essential article on the Kochs, by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America. Charles’s goal, as Doherty described it, was to tear the government “out at the root.” The brothers’ first major public step came in 1979, when Charles persuaded David, then thirty-nine, to run for public office. They had become supporters of the Libertarian Party, and were backing its Presidential candidate, Ed Clark, who was running against Ronald Reagan from the right. Frustrated by the legal limits on campaign donations, they contrived to place David on the ticket, in the Vice-Presidential slot; upon becoming a candidate, he could lavish as much of his personal fortune as he wished on the campaign. The ticket’s slogan was “The Libertarian Party has only one source of funds: You.” In fact, its primary source of funds was David Koch, who spent more than two million dollars on the effort. 

Many of the ideas propounded in the 1980 campaign presaged the Tea Party movement. Ed Clark told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage “a very big tea party,” because people were “sick to death” of taxes. The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.” 

That November, the Libertarian ticket received only one per cent of the vote. The brothers realized that their brand of politics didn’t sell at the ballot box. Charles Koch became openly scornful of conventional politics. “It tends to be a nasty, corrupting business,” he told a reporter at the time. “I’m interested in advancing libertarian ideas.” According to Doherty’s book, the Kochs came to regard elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a script.” A longtime confidant of the Kochs told Doherty that the brothers wanted to “supply the themes and words for the scripts.” In order to alter the direction of America, they had to “influence the areas where policy ideas percolate from: academia and think tanks.”

Of course, legalizing drugs and prostitution and opposing gun control appeals to many, across partisan and ideological bounds. But it's not a stretch to assume that the brothers aren't helping fund organizations such as NORML. They are, however, helping fundclimate denialism, which is what you would expect from oil industry billionaires. And while eliminating income taxes and campaign finance laws would greatly benefit billionaires, it would spell the end of the government's ability to check abuses by rapacious industries such as oil, health insurance, and banking, and it also would mean the end of even a semblance of a social contract. It also would mean the effective end of democracy, the new royalty and aristocracy being corporate plutocrats such as Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers.

Little wonder, then, that the brothers are helping fund phony movements now fronted by the likes of Glenn Beck. Because people like Beck wouldn't be capable of mobilizing masses of the manipulated, if not for the power of a propaganda shop disguised as a cable news network, and the financial backing of meticulously calculating billionaires whose real goals are mostly about coalescing their own wealth and power at the expense of the very people they are attempting to manipulate into serfdom. Beck is the front. The clown. The distraction. Behind Beck and his ilk lies the money trail. As Mayer concluded her article:

The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny. Recently, President Obama took aim at the Kochs’ political network. Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser, in Austin, he warned supporters that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United case -- which struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns -- had made it even easier for big companies to hide behind “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation” -- or even, he added, “a big oil company.”

Don't worry about Glenn Beck. Popular history will forget him. He's not a significant political player, and he's not a memorable entertainer. But the people hiding behind Beck and his ilk must be raised to public consciousness. Because so many of the Tea Party faithful don't even know who is promoting what they have been duped into believing is their cause, and certainly don't know the real cause they are being duped into promoting. Most of them are being played for suckers. To the financial backers of Beck and his ilk, most Tea Partiers are but another demographic group to exploit. It would be good for them and for the nation and the world if they ever figured that out.

Glenn Beck and the Yearning for Fascism

Saturday, September 4, 2010 by The Progressive
by Matthew Rothschild


Glenn Beck’s got me worried again about fascism in America.

His so-called restoring honor rally last weekend assumed that somehow America has been dishonored, and that is a classic trope of fascists.

Nor was I comforted by all talk from Beck about “America today begins to turn back to God.”

Nor was I comforted by the full-throated and repeated chants of “USA, USA.”

Nor by Sarah Palin having the gall to claim “we feel the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King,” this just 10 days after she told Dr. Laura to “reload,” after the talk show host said the N word 11 times in five minutes.

As if the rally wasn’t enough, Beck continued on his crusade during the week. Check this comment out: Beck said, “There are a lot of universities that are as dangerous with the indoctrination of the children as terrorists are in Iran or North Korea.”

The irony is that Ahmadinejad has actually denounced the universities in Iran with similar disdain. One year into his first term, he asked scornfully “why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities." He and Beck see eye to eye on that one.

Beck made a fool of himself also when he said, later in the week, that a flock of geese that appeared in the sky “was God’s flyover,” taking the place of an Air Force flyover he was not able to arrange. All of Beck’s references to “divine providence” and doing the work of God reminded me of a quote from W. S. Merwin, our new poet laureate, who once wrote: “The president of lies quotes the voices of God.”

I’ve been taking seriously the warnings of Noam Chomsky , who says he senses “the dark clouds of fascism” gathering here at home. I also take seriously the writings of Chris Hedges, the former New York Times reporter and author of several great books, including “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.” A couple years ago, Hedges wrote another book called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America.”

And back in March, Hedges elaborated on the theme: “The language of violence always presages violence. When someone like Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts of Democrats, when she says “Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!” there are desperate people cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who listen. . . .These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, ‘In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.’ It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration. Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press.”

Hedges was prescient here, anticipating the anti-immigrant wave and the anti-Muslim wave—and even Beck’s swipe at the universities.

Hedges also talked about the urgent need to give people jobs lest more people succumb to the lure of fascism.

Another intellectual I greatly admire, Walden Bello, just echoed Hedges’s warning about the economic crisis feeding into fascism. In his article “Can You Say, Fascism? The Political Consequences of Stagnation,” Bellow writes: “The common failure of both market fundamentalists and technocratic Keynesians so far to address the fears of the unemployed, the about-to-be unemployed, and the vast numbers of economically insecure people will most likely produce social forces that would tackle their fears and problems head-on. A failure of the left to innovatively fill this space will inevitably spawn a reinvigorated right with fewer apprehensions about state intervention, one that could combine technocratic Keynesian initiatives with a populist but reactionary social and cultural program. There is a term for such a regime: fascist. . . . Fascism in the United States? It's not as far-fetched as you might think.”

Consider yourself forewarned.

Glenn Beck’s "Restoring Honor Rally" and the Dunning-Kruger Effect

When Stupid People don’t Know that They are Stupid
by Chauncey DeVega

vidlink

The masses are asses. We know this. But the level of ignorance displayed by the attendees at the “Restoring Honor” rally is shocking even by contemporary standards.

It is quite clear that Glenn Beck is a master propagandist with a chilling and Svengali-like power over the lemmings of the New Right. Beck-watching is compelling (to me at least) because his popularity is a barometer of the toxins in our political atmosphere. Moreover, I wonder if Beck’s followers would be so slavish as to follow him off a cliff, and to what extremes would the tea party brigands go in their devotion to his cult of personality.

To point, here is a little armchair sociology to help put Beck and the New Right’s devotees into a broader context:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”

The Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward by Justin Kruger and David Dunning. Similar notions have been expressed–albeit less scientifically–for some time. Dunning and Kruger themselves quote Charles Darwin (”Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”) and Bertrand Russell (”One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”)

The Dunning–Kruger effect is not, however, concerned narrowly with high-order cognitive skills (much less their application in the political realm during a particular era, which is what Russell was talking about.Nor is it specifically limited to the observation that ignorance of a topic is conducive to overconfident assertions about it, which is what Darwin was saying. Indeed, Dunning et al. cite a study saying that 94% of college professors rank their work as “above average” (relative to their peers), to underscore that the highly intelligent and informed are hardly exempt. Rather, the effect is about paradoxical defects in perception of skill, in oneself and others, regardless of the particular skill and its intellectual demands, whether it is chess, playing golf or driving a car.

The hypothesized phenomenon was tested in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University. Kruger and Dunning noted earlier studies suggesting that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

Glenn Beck Playing with Fire on Religious Faith ('Beware false prophets', anyone?)

Mormon Talkshow Host Beck Claims "God speaks through Me"

In his pivotal address to the Southern Baptists in 1960, John F. Kennedy cautioned those suspicious of his Catholic faith, "Today, I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you -- until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril." But with his furious assault this weekend against President Obama's faith, Glenn Beck didn't merely ignore JFK's warning and the biblical admonition to judge not lest ye be judged. In declaring his followers' judgment of Obama, "People aren't recognizing his version of Christianity," the Mormon Beck could have been describing himself.

During his rally Saturday, Beck proclaimed, "America today begins to turn back to God." And while he didn't say which one, he made clear on Sunday it wasn't the Almighty worshipped by Barack Obama:

"I don't know what that is, other than it's not Muslim, it's not Christian. It's a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it."

Sadly for the Fox News host, as many of his Tea Bagging allies view his Mormon faith in precisely the same terms.

As CNN reported on Friday, "Some evangelicals are defensive over partnering with Glenn Beck, a Mormon." And as ThinkProgress noted, a Christian NewsWire press release titled "Glenn Beck's Mormonism Will Not Lead to Revival" was harsher still:

Glenn Beck promotes a false gospel. However, many of his political ideas can help America. ... Mormonism is not a Christian denomination but a cult of Christianity. ... Many endorse false gospels including Mormonism.

If that language of condemnation sounds familiar, it should. As former Massachusetts Governor and LDS member Mitt Romney ramped up his 2008 presidential run, Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network offered a similar primer in a document titled, "How Do I Recognize a Cult?" Mormon religious beliefs, CBN concluded, "are, to put is simply, wrong":

Mormonism teaches that God is not the only deity and that we all have the potential of becoming gods. (Ibid., p. 576.) (Remember that Satan's fall came about because he wanted to be like God.)... There has been constant revision of Mormon doctrine over the years, as church leaders have changed their minds on a number of subjects including polygamy, which was once sanctioned by the church.

In summary, the Mormon church is a prosperous, growing organization that has produced many people of exemplary character. But when it comes to spiritual matters, the Mormons are far from the truth.

As the 2008 GOP primaries approached, Mitt Romney faced an enormous hurdle among the heavily evangelical Republican base. A December 2007 Pew Research Poll found that 45% of evangelicals did not consider Mormons to be Christians. 25% were less likely to vote for an LDS candidate as a result. (A Gallup poll was also a warning to John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, where a candidate who was "72 years of age" or "married three times" was less likely than a Mormon to get Americans' backing.) So, it came as no surprise that on December 6, 2007, Romney tried to follow in JFK's footsteps with his speech, Faith in America."

In a speech that featured only one mention of the word "Mormon," Romney sought to walk a tightrope, proclaiming his own religion's just place in the American pantheon of faith without in any way describing it. Ironically, Romney took pains to sing the praises of the rites (and stereotypes) of other faiths while excluding his own:

"I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God. And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the Evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims."

But when it came to his core message, Romney stressed the Constitution was on his side:

"There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith."

Too bad Mitt Romney, like Glenn Beck, advocates a religious test of his own.

To be sure, atheists and agnostics have no place in leading Mitt Romney's America. That meaning was unambiguous in Romney's 2006 declaration to Fox News that "People in this country want a person of faith to lead them as their president." The former Massachusetts Governor made the point even more broadly today, proclaiming simply "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." Columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan observed the omission in Romney's 2007 speech, concluding "he would have lost the idiot vote" if GOP primary voters thought "this Romney character likes to laud atheists."

But it is not merely the unbelievers who would be disempowered and disenfranchised by Romney even as his Mormon brethren would welcomed among America's chosen faiths. The roughly five to seven million Muslims in America, too, are second class citizens in Romney USA.

As Mansoor Ijaz wrote in the Christian Science Monitor:

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "...based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

(Despite Romney's protestations that he was misquoted, Ijaz stands by his account.)

This is not to say that the Glenn Beck and Mitt Romney won't succeed with their strange political bedfellows. After all, supposed cult member Romney gave the May 2007 commencement address at Pat Robertson's Regent University, during which he praised "Dr. Robertson's dedication to strengthening and then nurturing the pillars of this community and our country." Three years later, Beck himself spoke to the graduates of the late Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, telling them, among other things, "shoot to kill."

But as CNN detailed, the suspicion of Beck's own faith among his would-be allies runs deep. Brannon Howse, a conservative writer and founder of Worldview Weekend, announced, ""While I applaud and agree with many of Glenn Beck's conservative and constitutional views, that does not give me or any other Bible-believing Christian justification to compromise Biblical truth by spiritually joining Beck."

And so it goes. As Glenn Beck touts that "return to God," many of his political fellow travelers demand Muslim Americans renounce their freedom of religion in lower Manhattan. Others target mosques in Tennessee and elsewhere. All involved would do well to heed the words of President Kennedy from that day in Houston 50 years ago:

"For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been -- and may someday be again -- a Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian, or a Baptist."

Or a Mormon.

***

(First off, to most people, it's obvious the Beck is a douchebag profiting off the fears of desperate and superstitious Americans during the worst economic times since the last Depression. During that first depression, there were tons of doomsday sayers like Beck preaching against progress and fairness--teaching that attaining and keeping wealth was every citizen's top priority, not feeding the poor or housing the homeless. I find it funny that a religion that says an 800 year old man built a boat and gathered two of every animal on that boat to survive a flood can throw rocks at any other religion--they're all just myth and superstition for people who can't grasp the scientific method &/or who fear dying. Still, Mormonism is some crazy hooey! I want to see just one pair of Mormon underwear before I die. And...can Mormons be Freemasons...?--jef)

Ron Paul’s Unexpected Message To The Tea Party

Posted on August 28, 2010

Ron Paul has some surprising news for the Tea Party: You’re being taken for a ride.

At least this is what many libertarians like Ron Paul believe when they see someone like Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin trying to lead the Tea Party at the “restoring honor” rally this weekend. In fact, Ron Paul believes, if you’re looking for real freedom, you should really go back to the core of the constitution and the bill of rights, which Beck and Palin do not fully endorse when you really look at their beliefs. Whether it be Palin’s support for starting more wars or Beck’s beliefs on paying the private Federal Reserve MORE interest on our money by means of a VAT tax.

Ron Paul believes in neither of the above.

Here was Ron Paul’s message to the Tea Party via The New York Times just the other day:

“As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world. We cannot talk about the budget deficit and spiraling domestic spending without looking at the costs of maintaining an American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 foreign countries. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for cutting a few thousand dollars from a nature preserve or an inner-city swimming pool at home while turning a blind eye to a Pentagon budget that nearly equals those of the rest of the world combined.”

While the Tea Party will be out supporting Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin this weekend, you wonder how many of them will be in full support of more wars and paying more interest to a group of untouchable and unauditable private bankers otherwise known as the FED? This is precisely what Ron Paul is asking the American public to consider when looking at the Tea Party leaders and see if they really stand for what they believe in.

Ron Paul believes the Tea Party is not about “left” or “right” like a lot of political pundits make it out to be. It’s about the constitution, and limited government.

Glenn Beck's Messiah Complex

Rupert Murdoch's community organizer says that God speaks through him. Does Beck think he's the Second Coming? (His followers just may think so.)
By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet
Posted on August 28, 2010

The record for self-appointed messiahs isn't good. (Kool-Aid anyone?) But that appears to be the path Glenn Beck is headed down -- not that he'd ask his followers to die for him; he just wants them, for a handful of self-righteous feel-good, to sell their grandchildren's future well-being into the coffers of billionaires David Koch and Rupert Murdoch.

In the months since his February appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Beck has added a new element to his customary line of wild-eyed, secular political conspiracy theories: his implied anointment as God's messenger, ordained to save the country and "restore honor" to its culture.

This month, he added a morning prayer segment to his daily radio program, and has described as "divine providence" his purportedly accidental selection of the date for the rally he will lead tomorrow on both the anniversary of and at the same site as Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. He has told his followers to expect a "miracle" on the day of the rally. And tonight, Beck's production company, Mercury Radio Arts, will produce a pre-game event at the (cough) Kennedy Center, modestly titled "Glenn Beck's Divine Destiny" (until it was apparently renamed "America's Divine Destiny" this morning, per the flyers handed ticket-seekers who were turned away).

However tempting it may be to dismiss Beck's faith-based grandiosity as delusional derangement, there's likely more than a bit of strategy involved in the revamped Beck formula, which is ultimately designed to marshal resentful white people to the anti-regulatory agenda of Rupert Murdoch, CEO of the parent company of Beck's employer, Fox News.

When the billionaire backers of the astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity Foundation (whose board is chaired by David Koch), first drew together the disparate pockets of discontent that formed the initial core of the Tea Party movement, they focused on the secular but personal issue of health care reform. This was a deliberate choice, a way of broadening the circle of those comprising the ranks of the right's ground troops, of bringing in those who share with the religious right a disdain for government, if not the evangelicals' intrusive agenda on issues of sexuality.

Now, it's election time. The dons of the Tea Party movement need the ground organizing know-how and data mines of the Religious Right, just as they need to rouse in secular, libertarian-minded types a fervor of religious proportions in order to keep these self-defined rugged individualists engaged to do the foot-work of get-out-the-vote efforts and phone-banking -- traditionally communitarian efforts, which is why church-based organizing was so effective in the 1980s. And so Beck has refashioned America's civic religion of Constitution and Founding Fathers as one with him at the center, taking orders from a Christian-ish God who whispers in his ear.

It's a clever 90-degree pivot. Tea Partiers already esteem Beck; a recent study by Democracy Corps shows Beck with a 75 percent "warm" rating among self-described Tea Partiers, making him the most esteemed figure the study's authors tested among those surveyed. Having already won their hearts, he is poised to win their souls, while also cleaving to his side a greater chunk of Christian evangelicals than had already found their remotes shifting from the Christian Broadcasting Network to Fox News.

The melding of religious predilections the Church of Beck represents may seem, at first glance, an unlikely draw for members of the Religious Right, not least because of Beck's Mormonism, which is deemed a terrible heresy among most Protestant Christians. And, as religion scholar Joanna Brooks has written, Beck's Founder-worship and tearful pleas are emblematic of his adopted faith.

But the Religious Right never was a theologically pure movement. It was, in fact, created by two paleo-Catholics and a Jew-turned-Christian-Reconstructionist (Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips), at a time when Catholicism was viewed as something quite as exotic and demonic as Mormonism may still seem today to evangelical Christians. It was this triumverate who essentially hired the segregationist Baptist minister, Rev. Jerry Falwell, to front their movement, named the Moral Majority.

Beck's reinvention into a more distinctly religious figure can be traced to a particular moment -- a moment that conferred on him a legitimacy among followers of the Religious Right because of his Mormon faith. It was the moment he took the stage at this year's commencement ceremony at Liberty University, which was founded by the late Jerry Falwell. At the moment that Beck was introduced to Liberty's Class of 2010 by Jerry Falwell, Jr., a new constituency opened unto him.

Though its leaders might be loathe to admit it, the Religious Right needs the Tea Party movement as much the Tea Party movement needs the precinct lists and campaign canvassers of the Religious Right. That's why, at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit next month, there will be significant crossover between the Tea Party movement and the Religious Right among such speakers as Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. and Amy Kremer of Tea Party Express. And hot on the heels of the aging Family Research Council is Ralph Reed's new and shiny Faith and Freedom Coalition, whose express purpose is to meld the two movements into an electoral juggernaut.

So, laugh, if you will, as Glenn Beck promises his followers that today, at the Lincoln Memorial -- as he attempts to subvert the message of Martin Luther King, they will "see the spirit of God unleashed, unlike you have probably ever seen it before, at least at a public function. You are going to see the power of God."

The force unleashed may not be that of God, but it will be a force, and one with a purpose. Resentment is powerful. It's the thing that Tea Partiers and followers of the Religious Right have in common: resentment of elites, resentment of the poor, resentment of any reminder that they enjoy any privilege at the expense of others by accident of birth. Through Beck, we are about to see resentment made holy.

"I Have a Scheme!"

Ron Paul on MSNBC Critical of those who fight building the NYC Mosque

vidlink

Glenn Beck not laughing, says "Stewart’s act has grown ‘tired’"

Stewart calls out Beck's inconsistent rhetoric about NYC Islamic center; Beck and crew complain it was only "mildly similar in a different context"
By David Edwards and Ron Brynaert
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

"That joke isn't funny anymore," Morrissey once sang for The Smiths. But that's because it hit "too near the bone."

Just a few months ago, Glenn Beck called a Jon Stewart impersonation of himself "hilarious," but on his Tuesday morning radio show, the pundit who used to call himself a "clown" ripped into the Comedy Central host for letting his act grow "tired."

Referring to Monday's Daily Show, Huffington Post's Katla McGlynn blogs that "the best part of the segment was when Stewart caught Glenn Beck in a huge contradiction."

The first clip showed Beck doubting Rauf's "moderate" stance due to statements he made after 9/11 saying America didn't "deserve" the attacks, but that American policies were "accessories to the crime."

"What kind of scheming, America-hating, extremist monster would say something so evil?" Stewart asked, before cutting to a clip of Beck saying LITERALLY the same thing as Rauf, just three months earlier. "What will he think tomorrow?"

Media Matters noted Beck's radio show response:

After playing Stewart's recent skewering of Beck's hypocrisy for attacking Rauf over comments strikingly similar to comments Beck himself made in April, Beck asked, "Does Jon Stewart not understand the difference between that last statement and the statement from the imam that happened two days after 9-11?" Beck gave no indication what actually distinguished Rauf's comments from Beck's, aside from their temporal proximity to September 11, 2001.

And it truly is difficult to find any difference beyond the semantic.

Beck: "When people said they hate us, well, did we deserve 9-11? No. But were we minding our business? No. Were we in bed with dictators and abandoned our values and principles? Yes. That causes problems."

Rauf: "I wouldn't say the United States deserved what happened on 9-11, but the United States' policies were an accessory to the crime that happened."

After not explaining the "difference" between his statement and "the statement from the imam" that Beck apparently sill finds appalling, Beck asked, "Does [Stewart] understand that I didn't hire someone to work for me that also went out and made statements like, 'The Jews are responsible," and 'If the - if Americans knew the Jews, they would do what Hitler tried to do to the Jews?'"

Jeremy Holden at Media Matters adds, "Beck's sidekick Stu Burguiere went on to say that Stewart 'has become dull,' and characterized Stewart's criticism as a 'boring, lazy, tired effort.'"

At worst, the statements were "mildly similar in a different context," Team Beck agreed.

This video is from Comedy Central's The Daily Show, broadcast Aug. 16, 2010.

The following audio clip from Beck's radio show is from Media Matters:

Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance

Alexander Zaitchik

Beck ‘lives in a cloistered world of paranoid delusion’: Jon Stewart

By David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Friday, June 4th, 2010

Analysis: How World Zionist Organization helped Israel win PR battle

Glenn Beck prides himself that there are secrets only he knows or has the raw guts to share with his audience.

"Turn on any media outlet other than this one," Beck proudly announced on Wednesday. "They're not going to show you this."

The video Beck was presenting so defiantly was a brief clip of Israeli commandos dropping onto the deck of a ship that was attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza and and being attacked by crew members with improvised clubs.

As Salon's Glenn Greenwald notes, the heavily-edited video released by the Israelis "was shown over and over on American television without question or challenge. Israeli officials and Israel-devoted commentators appeared all over television ... to spout the Israeli version without opposition."

Beck, however, wasn't about to let the facts get in the way of an opportunity for self-promotion. "You're hard-pressed to see it here in America from media outlets besides Fox," he declared breathlessly. Adding a well-practiced note of perplexity to his voice, he went on insinuatingly, "Nobody seems willing to show that. Leaving the question, why?"

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart was more than ready to answer Beck's question in Beck's own terms. "The only reason they wouldn't show it is bias by the lamestream media!!" he proclaimed. "It's not even the lamestream media any more, it's the shamestream media! ... Only Glenn Beck and Fox had the balls to be fair to Israel on American television!"

Stewart then undermined his own mocking endorsement of Beck's claim by showing the identical clip being run on MSNBC, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, Headline News, CNBC, and even Univision.

"The only place you didn't see it was Sesame Street," Stewart remarked. "That all aired in the 24 hours before Glenn Beck called out the media for not airing the footage."

"This could mean only one of two things," concluded Stewart. "Mr. Beck lives in a cloistered world of paranoid delusion that is impervious to a priori evidence that contradicts his worldview. Or -- and I believe this to be more likely -- Glenn Beck has become so powerful that his wise words can now be acted upon retroactively."

This video is from Comedy Central's The Daily Show, broadcast June 2, 2010.

Guardian reveals how 'Israeli PR machine won Gaza flotilla media battle'

The negative world reaction to what was immediately perceived an attack by armed Israeli commandos on a flotilla of peaceful activists bringing a shipload of humanitarian aid to the besieged people of Gaza provided a grave threat to Israel's public image. But according to the Guardian, it was a threat that the well-tooled Israeli propaganda machine had prepared in advance to deflect.

"Soon after the commandos landed on the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship carrying more than 600 of the activists, the live satellite broadcasts from the vessel were cut," the paper reports. "From that point on, the Israeli authorities seized almost complete control of how evidence of what was taking place could be made public. ... What the world has been watching since then is either edited video shot by the Israelis or other video shot by activists, confiscated by the Israelis and subsequently edited and made available through Israeli sources."

The Guardian cites a leaked set of talking points, issued by the World Zionist Organization and titled "Responding to the Consequences of the Episode," which argues for the legality of Israel's actions and places blame for any violence on the activists.

"Of course, the media were not responsible for the Israeli clampdown," the Guardian acknowledges, "but there could certainly have been more attention drawn to the imbalance in the sources from which the media were obtaining their information. ... And given the fact that virtually all the visual evidence is now in Israeli hands, it's almost inconceivable that we will ever know precisely what happened. At this stage, it seems fanciful to believe that any Israeli-based investigation will make available all the raw footage Israel has in its possession."